Say That You Love Me
by Comicbookfan
Summary: Amane is a angel, Bakura is a ghost, and Ryou's just trying to figure out how to survive. Amane/Yami Bakura, Ryou/Ryuuji


**Say That You Love Me  
**

Summary: Amane is an angel, Bakura is a ghost, and Ryou's just along for the ride.

AN/ Yeah...it's pretty sloppy, but...Oh, and the title and a couple of quotes in the fic come from the Cardigans' "Lovefool".

WARNING: Profanity, plenty of it

* * *

Amane died when she was seven years old.

It was a car crash that she still remembered plain as day, even after it happened. But she didn't enjoy thinking about that, so didn't often.

The cool thing about dying when you're little, though, is that it basically guaranteed a free passage into Heaven, and thus, angel-hood. And also, one could 'grow up' to the physical age of thirty. (All the old people basically aged down. It was really very convenient.)

Amane had been extremely disappointed that nobody played lyres in Heaven. By the time she got there, they were hopelessly outdated. Xylophones were the new in-thing.

Heaven was a happy place, one that she couldn't help but adore.

* * *

Ryou had loved Amane, and did not stop loving her all of his life. Really, she had been his twin. It had been positively devastating, what had happened. But he moved on. He had an incredible ability to move on. He moved on after boyfriends broke up with him, he moved on after he got evicted from three apartments, he moved on and made a life for himself.

Ryou was not a very happy young man.

Not at all, really.

He had some friends, and his job as a librarian was nice, but at twenty one, he knew he was missing something important.

Also, he had started to see flashes of somebody in the corners of his house.

That certainly wasn't a _good_ sign.

* * *

Bakura had been dead for a long time. Okay, not that long a time, but it had been a while since the fifties.

He had been a robber in his day, the best one in all of Domino and perhaps all of Japan, thank you.

Yeah, it hadn't really been the most spectacular ending in the world when he got shit-faced drunk and ended up pitching himself out the window. Not even with some tragic, romantic ulterior motive (Bakura had never, ever been in love, considered it an unnecessary weakness after seeing his family slaughtered as a child). No, he'd just tripped.

He didn't really know why, but possibly because of that, he had become a ghost. A freaking ghost. It was pretty cool that he could make himself invisible, or, okay, almost completely transparent at will, but sometimes...well, it was tiring.

Except for when he jumped out of corners in libraries and shouted 'BOO' at people. It was always fun to hear them scream.

But, over his many, many years that he had spent as a twenty three year old (...ish), he had realized some things. He was missing something in life, and at first he thought he was missing the ability to make people bleed, to feel the sunlight on his skin.

But no. He just couldn't figure it out.

So he took to haunting some kid's house and watching him, seeing exactly what life had that he needed.

* * *

Amane sometimes liked to go over to the real world to see her brother. They had been very close in life, and though she had been shoved into the back of his mind, just a gentle pricking every once in a while, as every healthy soul did with their trauma, she liked to think they would have been close had he been able to see her.

His apartment was okay. It wasn't a very nice part of town, and spiders the size of her head did seem to favor the lobby floorboards, but other than that, Ryou managed to keep his livjng space sufficiently clean, despite all of those creepy, creepy dolls he insisted on keeping around, not to mention the way that the bed sometimes tilted to the side and...okay, so it wasn't a very nice apartment. But Ryou had made a life for himself, which was better than anything Amane could say for herself.

(Because she was dead and all, get it? Okay, so maybe George--a friend of hers from Heaven--was right when he said she could work on her sense of humor.)

But the place was usually empty, but she could usually find something to keep her entertained and to see how her brother was doing.

Usually he wasn't doing very well. Ryou had always turned to unhealthy things to deal with stress, to to mention the dolls and the occult and destroying things. That was why the walls in his living spaces were all carved up and most of his knives quite blunt. (He was usually intoxicated in some way when things like that happened, and generally didn't remember much about how the carvings had appeared on his walls.)

Amane was aware her brother was miserable, but just preferred not to think of it, because someday he would be with her and not miserable anymore. She hated seeing him, hated it, but it was like a person making a vigil to a grave.

She was obligated to, and much of the time her visits were rather pleasant, considering he usually didn't get home until late at night.

And it was one of those days that she had been looking around (it had certainly been easier back when he would write her) for updates on the well-being of her sibling that she ran in to...well, a guy. Basically.

A lot of screaming went on after that, what with her screaming when she saw him and he screaming when she screamed, it was a right headache.

"What in all of holy fuck?" Well, that man did certainly have a talent for French.

"Um," Amane coughed daintily. "I'm sorry."

"Uh huh." The man, who bore a striking resemblance to her brother but at the same time a marked difference, due to his leaner build, longer hair, and much redder eyes and overall hotness factor, looked at her with hostility. "Who are you?"

"Amane Bakura."

He raised an eyebrow. "Kid's sister. Interesting. Tell me, Amane Bakura, how do you see me?"

"Well, it's pretty easy, you're right there."

"I'm dead."

"So'm I."

"Really?"

"No, seriously. Car crash. A copious amount of blood. Definitely dead."

He narrowed his eyes, studying her, until he smiled a somewhat lecherous smile. "Pleased to meet you," he purred. "Amane."

Despite his hotness, his creepiness factor had skyrocketed a short while ago, so Amane narrowed her eyes back at him challengingly. "Why the hell are you in my brother's apartment?"

The man chuckled, spreading cat-like across Ryou's bed, not even making a disturbance in the comforter. "I have nothing better to do."

"Well, can't you just go back to Heaven?"

He opened one of his closed eyes easily, blood red following the woman. "I haven't ever entered Heaven. Only here. I'm a ghost, idiot."

"Oh."

He laughed harshly. "So, what do you think a ghost does?"

"Um...haunt people?"

"And that's exactly why I'm here." And then he left in a flurry of long white hair and pointed teeth, leaving Amane alone, intrigued and totally turned on.

Apparently, the dead had hormones too.

And here Amane had thought it would get easier.

* * *

Ryou didn't know who he was making out with in his room.

That was really sad. Really, honestly, quite pathetic. He never did think he would stoop quite this low, but everybody did have to hit a lowest point, and the young man currently on top of him was very attractive, not to mention obviously...experienced.

And throughout his life, Ryou had learned to go with the flow.

So he went with it.

* * *

Bakura carefully observed the young man under the sheets. His partner had quite recently left, and Bakura wondered if that was how things were with sexuality in these days, if people just had sex and left.

He supposed it was like that.

Ryou, under the covers, looked very innocent and very, very small, even though in real life he must have at least hit five foot eight.

After looking around the apartment, Bakura knew he had found somebody who could keep him quite entertained, one of those damaged souls, like he had been.

Ryou had a doll collection, figurines he seemed to have made, that were painstakingly decorated. His apartment walls had been nearly destroyed by what Bakura's expert eye recognized as violent knife marks, and it was quite easy to see how the child took his pain out on things. He was rarely at the place, so Bakura had plenty of time to walk around, testing out the machinery and at times leaving the TV on.

Just to freak the human man out.

Yes, he had found a new host.

One who was beautiful, and had a beautiful sister who Bakura was sure he would sometime see again to prove it.

A feral smile spread over his face as his wine red eyes narrowed.

"Goodnight, landlord," he whispered softly, and left before the young man's large brown eyes snapped open.

* * *

Amane knew Ryou wasn't home at that hour, and she knew it because she didn't really leave the apartment. Angels had rules too, and it was one that they followed very specific people, and only showed up at their living place. There was no way to change that.

But she wasn't looking for her brother. She was looking for that other one, the young ghost that had so intrigued her. She liked him. Okay, maybe not quite liked, but she was certainly attracted to him.

So she sat on the bed in her white summer dress, bluish white hair pulled back in a ponytail, waiting quietly.

"Looking for me?" a purring voice said from behind her.

She jumped, which wasn't sexy at all and totally ruined the image she had been trying to go for. Flustered, she tried to smooth down her clothes, and then looked at the ghost with half lidded eye lids which _Cosmopoitan: Angel Edition_ confirmed were definitely sexy.

A lazy smile spread across his face. "What are you looking for, little girl? A fling? Of the sort that that boy seems to always be having. You know him. Your brother."

"Lets not talk about Ryou right now." Screw the living, she really freaking wanted to screw the dead! "As for your question," she smiled flirtatiously, "You tell me."

Amane had always been outgoing, and it worked for her now better than ever.

Bakura licked his lips with a pointed tongue, and moved closer to her, so that she could almost feel him in that way angels felt things, so deeply. Almost human, almost. She wondered if ghosts felt things. (They did, in their way, but it was a numb way, and the sensory was almost unattainable to them.)

She didn't want to know him, not really, and he didn't want to know her. So their lips met, and there were the senses Bakura had been longing for, and there was that missing thing Amane had been looking for, and perhaps their relationship would not have become what it did if they were not convenient, two beautiful once-people. But really, there weren't many choices where they wandered (at least, where Bakura wandered).

It was probably the dead thing that brought them together in the beginning.

It was probably the dead thing that broke them apart in the end.

They stayed there, kissing--making out, if those terms were appropriate--for a while, such a while that their clothes were nearly all off by the time Ryou flung the door open and began retching violently in the hall.

Then Amane had to disappear.

Bakura? He was pretty good at that disappearing thing too. He knew how to blend himself into shadows, and how to wait, and how it was to yearn for something. (Or somebody, like her.)

* * *

Ryou passed out in the hall, and it was really a miracle he managed not to choke on his vomit, and Bakura was almost surprised at the fact he woke up in the morning.

The young man coughed, and, suddenly consumed by a blinding head ache, stumbled to the bathroom to wash up.

Bakura almost chuckled. _Screw-up._ He thought, not entirely maliciously, because he knew he would have been worse if he had been alive. He would have been fucked up for fun.

* * *

Amane thought that she had a crush on Bakura, which was quite honestly very bad, because she had never really really heard of a ghost/angel relationship thingy working out. There weren't so many other options, though! None of the guys in Heaven seemed remotely interested in her, which she resented, because she thought that if she tried she could be pretty freaking hot.

And so, her visits to the apartment became very frequent, and after a month she wasn't a virgin (no, she didn't know how the sex thing worked either for people like her and Bakura, but hey, the world was incomprehensible sometimes) and wasn't alone anymore.

* * *

It was three months, four, five, six, seven, a year.

She knew how it was to sit with somebody and feel their ice cold hands travel down her skin and feel their ice cold lips travel down her neck, how it was to want to say "I love you" but never actually do it because love must have been different. It was always different in the romance novels than this soft, silent thing she had.

She liked her eyes and they way he sometimes played with her hair and the way he sometimes let her play with his hair and the way that they could communicate, have whole conversations without saying a word.

No, it must have been love, or she would have stopped this a long time ago.

* * *

Bakura began feeling differently about Amane, thinking about her as more than a casual fuck, a girl that could finally make that ecstacy rise up in the numb, lifeless thing that he was.

He couldn't help but like the way she whispered to him and rested her head in his lap and the way every movement she made sounded like music.

He couldn't help it, and tried not to think anything of it when he didn't move on to a new host after a couple of months after studying their actions and reading them like a book, cover to cover (he had never learned to read words, people were next best).

He knew that he didn't move because...well, because she was there, and she was the only link to that one thing he had never experienced.

* * *

"Do you think you could love people?" She had asked him once. It really meant _do you think you love me?_

He had simply stared at her, quiet as anything, but he had stared at her for a long time, and in his eyes had been an answer to her question.

Too bad that for the first time, she just hadn't been able to tell what his eyes said.

* * *

_Amane and Bakura.  
_

Both of them had noticed the way their names fit together so perfectly. Perhaps another reason why they could not seem to tear away.

* * *

Even as Amane and Bakura's existences became less sad, Ryou couldn't help the way his life spun out of control. Amane watched sadly when she was not in the throes of passion at the way things became.

He never used to be this way, he knew that much.

He never used to do that binge drinking thing, he never used to miss work and get his pay docked and barely pay rent and forget to eat.

He never meant for things to be the way they were.

He had a spot, perhaps, of light color in a world that had become increasingly monochromatic. His name was Ryuuji.

(Ryuuji, beautiful, beautiful man, with hair that felt like silk slipping through his hands and eyes bright and intense, who was so much more in love with life than Ryou, so into living that he almost managed to pull Ryou into that love too.)

And Ryuuji came over, and they talked, and they drank, and they had sex, and it all seemed to mean so much more than anything else. Those kisses, Ryou thought, would stay burnt forever onto his skin, because even though the young man, flippant, careless, beautiful Ryuuji didn't seem to think of his as much more than a casual friend, to Ryou he was so much more.

* * *

Amane and Bakura wwere perfectly aware what was going on with them and what was going on with Ryou were similar in a way but at the same time dissimilar.

Both knew they felt something deep for each other, and both knew they were afraid to say it.

And both knew Ryuuji and Ryou felt something deep for each other, loved each other because of the way they looked when they were together, the vibrance in those rare smiled. But the difference was that it wasn't so much that those men were afraid of saying what they knew. They were bursting with it, want, need to say it. They just couldn't, because they didn't realize that they both felt the same way.

And the song Ryou kept playing, over and over and over again haunted them all, every single being that sometimes inhabited that apartment.

_(Love me, love me, say that you love me...)

* * *

_And one day, Amane finally broke, and looking up at the ghost she said, "I wish I could take you to Heaven with me."

And Bakura finally, finally managed to grow a pair, go back to the bluntness he had had when he had robbed banks in his glory days, and he finally managed to say: "Me too."

As they looked at each other and felt something begin to slowly change, Ryuuji and Ryou burst into the apartment, singing a giggly song.

The black-haired man cut off the song after a few lines, and, with a slurred voice, said, "I'm going home now. Have to walk. You know how it is."

And when he left, almost a minute after, Ryou's tiny voice picked up volume just a little, singing a couple of wavering lines, the last ones.

_(You'll never know, dear, how much I love you...please don't take my sunshine away.)_

_

* * *

_"We need to do something about them," Amane couldn't help but say sadly as she and Bakura sat in the tiny living room, having managed to sneak out of Ryou's room while the living man's vision was blinded by tears. "They ought to figure it out by now. They ought to know." She looked at her...whatever he was...(lover?) and a sneaking idea came upon her. "You have to do something. You can communicate with the mortal world for real." A vibrance had penetrated her eyes, even though she knew, overwhelmingly, that Bakura, who was like stone, would never do something of the sort.

"That's an idiotic idea." He said coldly, but couldn't help but feel something in his numb body, something going through him, warmth, perhaps--something he could not remember feeling ever. He snarled. "But I'll do it."

And he thought she didn't hear him say it, but she did. "Only because I love you."

She smiled softly as she left for the place that was her home but didn't feel nearly as nice as being next to him, even though he was so cold. And she thought he didn't hear it, but he did: "I love you."

* * *

Bakura didn't feel very badass at all, in fact, he felt like the men he had beaten up in his day, far too emotional. He knew, he reassured himself, that he was still a cold, heartless bastard. But every bastard had to have room for something in that heart-that-wasn't-a-heart. His just happened to be for an angel. No, not the figurative kind, he wasn't that much of a sap, but a real one. And he lamented the fact that simple want, physical things, fuck-and-leave, the kind of things he used to do, had suddenly turned into something.

He wasn't going to fight the damn kid's battles for him, but maybe he'd stop playing that fucking song all day if he and the other guy just hooked up already.

So, one night after Ryuuji and Ryou went out, Bakura scribbled down a few words on a sticky note.

And Ryuuji found them, and even though he immediately ripped the note to shreds and ate it (he was somewhat tipsy), he understood loud and clear what he was supposed to do, say--the thing he had wanted to ever since he met the young man with the very white hair.

He knew that on the note was an instruction, an order, and he followed it because he might have been a rebel, but...

_Say that you love me._

So he said it.

And, as it turned out, love was reciprocated, and they wondered how they could have been so blind, both glad that the other one took the initiative and finally admitted it.

* * *

Bakura slept for the first time in years that night--sleep wasn't something he had to do, but for whichever reason, that night it seemed like a good thing to do.

And when he woke up, he was warm, and lay next to a body he knew well, and his eyes opened and locked with Amane's blue eyes, and she smiled. "See? Happy endings happen sometimes. I win."

Welcome to Heaven, said a post-it note stuck on his chest.

* * *

And in the end, none of them were alone.


End file.
